Per 
“WHO IS GRIGORY CHERENKOV?!” gleamed a bold, black lettering on red background. It was a tag line among multiple lines, surrounded by click-bait icons around the page.
Sasha’s hand hovered over the mouse pad for a moment, then gently placed a finger upon it and glided it over the smooth surface that was always somehow, neither quite warm nor cool to touch. The title disappeared quickly off the screen to be replaced by multiple titles on various authors with names like Zachary Sitchen or Graham Hancock or Richard Carrier. “I’ll look at that one later. Right now I don’t need to get worked up over someone else’s misconceptions.”
“Sasha, the good Dr. Clef wishes to see you now.” Floated an almost taunting voice from the door. Sasha took a moment to sit up, breathe deeply and close down his laptop. He only bothered to look in the direction of the voice as he stood up. The laptop was secured in a fairly worn leather briefcase and Sasha himself looked the part of a casual or vacationing writer or professor. He certainly didn’t look or act or even behave like what he turned out to be. The bitterness of that point washed down his throat as he took each step to meet with a thing that looked like a man and acted like Robin Williams on a cocktail of meth and acid in chilled absinthe. As he walked past the owner of the voice, the young woman pouted just a bit at being ignored. Mostly she was sad to get no response as she had come to be annoyed by Sasha over the last year.
Sasha gently crossed his left hand in front to grip and control the edge of the door while it opened. He then pressed his right shoulder into the bulk of the heavy, dense wood and stepped easily into the room. “Yes sir?” he offered formally. Immediately he was uncomfortable as the man sitting on the front edge of the desk focused his manic stare into Sasha’s eyes.
“Hey there! Just the guy I wanted to see!” Sasha found himself wanting to look away from the oddly colored eyes staring him down across the office. He shifted his own view to keep from backing down. Staring only into the impossibly dark pupil surrounded by turquoise blue, Sasha found himself feeling a sense of vertigo and switched to the other eye, finding a similar feeling in the ring of emerald around a well of obsidian. Trying hard to suppress a reflex to vomit, Sasha gasped and swallowed hard to look back to the other eye of midnight surrounded by… greenish brown…
Sasha covered his eyes, looking down as he felt a headache developing behind his own eyes.
“Hey, you ok, Skippy? You look kinda pale.” Offered Dr. Clef. Sasha found he could not answer without allowing his own throat to allow an escaping bile. “You want some water?” Sasha nodded in the affirmative and kept rubbing his forehead to keep from looking into those impossible eyes. A glass of water was immediately available under his chin and he reached for it, disregarding how fast it had arrived. It pulled away at the last second as Dr. Clef’s warning came to Sasha’s ears as if from across the room. “Be careful, I don’t want you to spill. I just got the carpet cleaned from the last new recruit I had to interview.” And then Sasha held the glass and was thankful for the respite from the stare down with Clef. He carefully scanned the room and stepped toward a softer chair facing the corner of Clef’s desk and sat down with little grace, yet careful to spill not even a drop of water.
“I’m having you here to congratulate you on being advanced to group operations!” Clef seemed to beam from his chair behind the desk with his feet crossed on the desktop and his arms reaching for the ceiling. Sasha found that he could focus on the unnatural grin without getting nausea and did so. “You really should stop by the health center on the way out, you don’t look so good.”
“I thought I was going to work in PR?” Sasha asked with honest confusion.
“OH! You are! Trust me on that!” Clef swiveled quickly into sitting forward with his hands crossed before him. “But we need you to do it with a TEAM! And not JUST a TEAM, an OMEGA team! In fact, you’ll be joining Omega 12!” Clef’s voice became a sudden low mutter, “sounds like a vitamin or lousy nutrition supplement but they don’t ask ME for names, do they?” then with vigor, “I have suggested YOU for their team on account of the fact that they have lost two members to the old Reaper and one more to reassignment. This group NEEDS YOU, Grigory!” Sasha stiffened a bit at the use of his middle name, his published name. “They need you to help them better interact with the public and to understand just what the hell they’re running up against on a regular basis. Because despite being an OMEGA group, they’re all fairly new to this work, so you’ll fit right in!” Sasha was over the bout of vertigo and focused on the meanings behind this assignment.
“So you’re saying that instead of writing up public accounts for missions and spinning media reports for Foundation activities, you’re having me join an actual Omega Team to deal with SCP’s directly.” It was carefully worded and not stated as a question. Sasha knew dealing with Clef was a tricky business that left most people on the wrong end of the deal.
“Grigory!” Clef beamed at him like a proud father about to bring his son into the family business. “You know I told you how much I LOVE your work! And I just thought that you should really get in on the ground floor to help the team with your substantial knowledge of all the group politics and subtleties of negotiations.” This suddenly began to crystallize a series of thoughts in Sasha’s head.
“So, you want to simultaneously help inform the team about COG, CI, various government groups activities AND give the team a smoke screen to make them appear as a likely independent conspiracy exposure group.” Sasha took a deep breath. It was terrifying and exciting at the same time. He’d never seriously considered being a field agent. Even with the last year of physical fitness and Foundation special service training, he’d thought he’d always be safely tucked away within the confines of Foundation walls. Now he realized that he was about to become a real time actor in one of the biggest secret agencies he’d ever investigated and almost exposed. And it gave him a discomforting chill to understand that the man giving him this assignment was very likely doing it all as a joke. “But why me, Dr. Clef. I may be a little old for field work.”
“Not even a consideration! You’ve passed your training and gotten through all the special tests… well, you do need to work around that whole motion sickness thing. But you will be an incredible asset to the Foundation in this role!” Clef’s smile grew frighteningly wide and Sasha stared into it thinking about the satisfaction of smashing it with a punch. “Besides, you’ve never seen Hancock or Carrier doing anything CLOSE to having the balls for this kind of experience. And most of all…” added Clef calmly while sitting back in his comfy, full sized office chair. “it’ll be fun.”
Sasha walked down the hallways and doors until he came to his own quarters. The feeling of disorientation was gone and no trace of vertigo remained. He was sure that Clef had managed to create all of that somehow. But still, the option was exciting, except for the travel. He’d already read some of the team’s reports and files as he’d done with several other teams. He’d even participated with some of the public report writing, although none of his original copy made it to print yet. It would indeed be an interesting assignment. Starting tomorrow, he’d be part of Team Omega 12. He looked at his ID cards for travel and sighed about using his full name. It was part of his rebranding and reentry into the real world again. Grigory S. Cherenkov, conspiracy specialist and writer, passing expert on the history of secret groups and societies, recently trained to be passably competent as a Foundation agent and front man to credit every and any organization or individual other than the Foundation for work done to protect the world from anomalous threats. In the space of two years he’d gone from being a discredited and denounced pariah in his field to an inside man in one of the most enigmatic organizations of all time. And now he’d be a field agent because the mischievous Dr. Clef, whose name could only be pronounced on a ukulele, thought ‘it would be fun’. How could this go wrong?
